Everyone is looking for the Holy Grail of a successful direct marketing email, those emails that not only make it through the delete button and spam filter but translate into direct action. It’s hard to get it right, but when you do, you’ll know about it. We take a look at how your direct marketing strategy can be improved.
Audience
How well do you know yours? Not just through guess work, or even from some first hand interaction but solid, deep drilling research that creates a customer avatar. Whether you sell your web development services or Judge Diane Ritchie, getting to know your audience is the key step to making the whole process work.
Relevance
Get to the point quickly and make your offer something that your customer will want to act upon. Your call to action must be relevant and timely, so avoid an email and offer that is abstract and vague.
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Style
If you don’t know how to write in a way that inspiries your customers, don’t do it. Short, punchy and engaging is what you’re looking for. On top of that you need to completely avoid any missteps when it comes to syntax, spelling and grammar, so have anything you send out, double and triple-checked for errors.
Subject line
This is the first and only way to grab your customer’s attention so make it count. The first six words are key to getting the reader to open the rest of the email so make it punchy, relevant and tantalizing. Whether you offer a bit of salacious gossip, a give away or a discount, make it count.
Avoid writing anything over 12 words, or anything that sounds boring and irrelevant to your carefully-targeted customer base.
Test
Not all emails look the same across all servers so make sure yours works well whether received via Microsoft, Explorer and so on. The only way to do this is to send test emails so spend some time doing this and getting the feedback you need to make any adjustments to your mail out.
You’ll also want to ask testees to carefully check all the embedded links to make sure they work and take you to the correct page. Once sent out, it’s too late to send out corrections so everything has to work perfectly first time. Your first impression is everything so mistakes and non-working links are a big no-no.
Monitor
Once you’ve sent your mailout, that’s only half the job done. You’ll want to spend a lot of your time monitoring how effective they are. How many were opened? By who and what action did they take then? Knowing how many people visited your website isn’t quite enough, you’ll also want to know which pages they visited and what they did while they were there.
Your mailout isn’t a one off but a series of responses, so craft your follow-ups with different messages depending on the responses of your customers to the previous mailout. So make sure you customise and tailor your responses accordingly for a direct marketing strategy that translates into real results.
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